In her keynote at the ITA Professional Symposium (The ITA Professional Symposium was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in February 2017), Lauren Herckis referred to culture and teaching as “invisible.” During the Q and A, I questioned her use of the term, but the metaphor of invisibility re-emerged throughout the remainder of the discussion showing that many in attendance agreed with the idea that culture, language, and teaching are invisible. I found this stance ironic considering the common practice in our field of using of video and transcription. In fact, the issue that our ITAs face is not that language and teaching are invisible. It is that language and teaching are in the moment happenings that cannot be recovered verbatim from memory. In addition, potential ITAs often lack the conceptual framework and tools to analyze, discuss, and reflect upon teaching and interaction.

In this article, I will briefly discuss the use of video and transcription to make language and teaching visible. I will then analyze a transcribed excerpt from a university mathematics course, drawing attention to the interplay between prosody and gesture, and discuss how the excerpt might be used in ITA preparation. I point out that while language and teaching may be evanescent in the moment they are nonetheless visible and made re-visible through the use of video and transcription. Finally, I suggest that we do ourselves a disservice as a profession by being lackadaisical in how we talk about language and teaching.

Using Video to Make Language and Teaching Visible

The use of video has been suggested by or part of commercially available texts for ITA preparation for decades (Gorsuch, Meyers, Pickering, & Griffee, 2012; Meyers & Holt, 2002; Smith, Meyers, & Burkhalter, 1992). Videos and transcripts are particularly valuable resources for two reasons: they lend permanence to language and teaching, and they enable us to highlight embodied resources. First, they make the fleetingly audible and visible, i.e., language and teaching, re-visible. As Garfinkel (2002, p. 220) pointed out in his study of a university Chemistry lecture, the action of the classroom “cannot seriously be identified, formulated, or solved” without “analyzable audio and video documents.” The details of language and teaching are difficult to reconstruct from memory, but a digital and written record of language and teaching gives us the ability to watch and re-watch and analyze and re-analyze sequences of classroom interaction. When we watch videos, we are able to notice even those actions we missed in situ. Video and transcripts solve our dilemma with the evanescence of language and teaching, so our next objective becomes giving our students the concepts and vocabulary to analyze and reflect upon what they see, and in turn to hopefully integrate (or not) what they have seen into their own teaching.

So that becomes our task – developing a framework and lexicon for our students to use to think and talk about language and teaching. While ITA research and practice have developed robust frameworks for understanding and teaching prosody (Gorsuch et al., 2012; Hahn, 2004; Kang, Rubin, & Pickering, 2010; Meyers & Holt, 2002; Pickering, 2001, 2004; Smith et al., 1992) embodiment is not well researched in the ITA realm, which is likely the source of early descriptions of lab interactions as “messy” (Myers, 1994). While some face-to-face classroom situations may seem messy when we focus only on lexis and morphosyntax, Goffman (1964, p. 136) observed that “interaction […] has its own processes and its own structure, and these don't seem to be intrinsically linguistic in character, however often expressed through a linguistic medium.” From an embodied perspective, participants interact not just through talk, but through mutual orientation to a “temporally unfolding juxtaposition of multiple semiotic fields,” including prosody, gesture, gaze, body position, and the use of classroom artifacts (Goodwin, 2000, p. 1517; Mondada, 2016). Video gives us direct access to the embodied resources used in teaching that are often overlooked when we focus on language only in terms of lexis and morphosyntax. As ITA trainers, we must draw our students’ attention to the “complex multimodal Gestalts” (Mondada, 2016) formed by the co-occurrence of talk, gesture, gaze, facial expression, and the use of objects in the environment. In the following two sections, I will discuss how we can do so.

A Brief Analysis of Prosody and Embodiment While Introducing a Term

Excerpt 1 is from a university calculus course taught by Brian (pseudonym). For more explanation of the broader study, participants, etc., see Looney, Jia, and Kimura (2017). The analysis unpacks how Brian uses various linguistic and non-linguistic resources to explain a field-specific term. The excerpt occurred near the opening of an explanation of the term “flux.” During Brian’s introduction of the term, he enacts many suggestions for teaching that we see in the aforementioned ITA training texts, e.g., use concrete examples, clear thought groups, and multimodal resources. In Excerpt 1, the transcription conventions note final falling and continuing rising tones (↘ and →), prominence (underlined text), and embodied resources (aligned with talk by { and written in Times New Roman). While the excerpt presented here is short, the actual explanation of the term is quite long and involves multiple concrete examples.

Excerpt 1 – “Flux is a word"

Click to enlarge

Just before Excerpt 1, Brian was leaning against the chalkboard and informally introducing the term flux in the context of a popular science fiction movie from the 1980’s (Frame 1.1). Brian then gave a brief definition of flux in lay terms (lines 1 and 3). Note the stress and falling intonation that he placed on the words flux, stuff, pass through, and surface to create distinct intonational units and highlight new information (Pickering, 2001).

As Brian concluded his layperson definition, he walked toward the chalkboard and began drawing a sailboat (lines 4-6, Frame 1.2). As he was drawing, Brian verbally presented students with the concrete example of a sailboat (lines 3-7). Even though he was facing away from the students momentarily, Brian spoke in clear thought groups and used intonation to emphasize key information. He then turned back to his students and began expanding upon his example (lines 7-8, Frame 1.3). In lines 8-13, Brian stated that the more perpendicular the sail is to the wind the more wind the sail catches. As he was speaking, his hand first pointed in the direction of the wind he had drawn on the board then he turned his hand, representing the sail he was speaking of, perpendicular to the wind (Frames, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6). In sum, we can subdivide the above excerpt into three moves: layperson definition, introduction of concrete example, and explanation of concrete example. We see that Brian used linguistic, prosodic, and embodied resources to construct his explanation. Prosodic and embodied resources, i.e., intonation, stress, gesture, and the chalkboard, were particularly important because they subdivided and highlight important information.

From Analysis to Application

This analysis, though brief, is useful for teachers trying to help potential ITAs see and discuss language and teaching. While a detailed transcript is useful for the teacher and eventually the student, I suggest starting with a broadly transcribed transcript with line numbers and space for students to make notes (see Excerpt 2). Courier New is a great font for making transcripts because each letter, symbol, and space are the same width. The line numbers and simplified transcription create an artifact that students can use to code different parts of the explanation. For instance, we could code lines 1 and 3 as “layperson definition,” lines 3-7 as “introducing a concrete example,” and lines 7-13 as “expanding upon a concrete example.”

Excerpt 2 – “Flux is a word” for classroom use

Click to enlarge

Within the subsections that we have identified, we can analyze and discuss prosody and embodied resources. This is where the vocabulary from discourse intonation and CA will be particularly handy. In terms of prosody, there are three features that I find this clip particularly useful for: thought groups, prominence, and final falling (or rising-falling) intonation. Students can work in groups or individually to identify the thought groups, prominent words, and intonation contours. Students can also identify and describe the embodied resources they notice. This excerpt would be particularly useful for explaining and analyzing the use of the chalkboard and gesture. After students have completed their analyses, have them share and discuss them as a class. This is where the detailed transcript in particularly useful especially because it illuminates the complex interplay between talk and embodied resources. After the discussion, students can use their analysis as a micro-template for their own assignment of introducing a term or concept. There could be other uses for this recording as well, e.g., a fluency exercise using shadowing. In addition, video can be a useful tool for helping provide feedback on ITA performance in role plays and micro-teaching.

Conclusion

Conversation Analysis and related disciplines such as interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have made readily apparent that language and teaching are visible and analyzable. At the same time, ITA practice has, if only implicitly, reflected the stance that language and teaching are visible by using video recordings. Nonetheless, we are prone to speak of language as invisible because of its apparent evanescence in our day to day existence. While words like invisible are easy to use to describe language, we do so at our own, as well as our students’, peril. Calling language and teaching invisible perpetuates myths about language and teaching as individual and innate traits instead of culturally-situated actions and practices that can be developed through structured mediation. Adjectives like unappreciated or unnoticed better describe language and teaching, and would be more useful for us when speaking to those outside ITA practice. As language teachers who often work with relatively high proficiency learners, it is our responsibility to provide students with the concepts and terms to analyze, reflect upon, and discuss language and teaching. We must help them talk and think about what they see every day. We are not helping them see the invisible, but helping them notice the overlooked.

References

Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (A. W. Rawls Ed.). New York: Rowan and Littlefield.

Goffman, E. (1964). The neglected situation. American Anthropologist, 66(6/2), 133-136. doi:10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00090

Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489-1522.

Gorsuch, G., Meyers, C., Pickering, L., & Griffee, D. (2012). English Communication for International Teaching Assistants (Second ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Hahn, L. D. (2004). Primary stress and intelligibility: research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals. TESOL Quarterly, 38(2), 201-223. doi:10.2307/3588378

Kang, O., Rubin, D. L., & Pickering, L. (2010). Suprasegmental measures of accentedness and judgments of language learner proficiency in oral English. The Modern Language Journal, 94(4), 554-566. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2010.01091.x

Looney, S. D., Jia, D., & Kimura, D. (2017). Self-directed okay in mathematics lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 107, 46-59. doi:https://doi.org
/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.11.007

Meyers, C., & Holt, S. (2002). Success with Presentations. Burnsville, MN: Aspen Productions.

Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(3), 336-366.

Myers, C. L. (1994). Question-based discourse in science labs: issues for ITAs. In C. G. Madden & C. L. Myers (Eds.), Discourse and Performance of International Teaching Assistants (pp. 83-102). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Pickering, L. (2001). The role of tone choice in improving ITA communication in the classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 35(2), 233-255. doi:10.2307/3587647

Pickering, L. (2004). The structure and function of intonational paragraphs in native and nonnative speaker instructional discourse. English for Specific Purposes, 23(1), 19-43. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0889
-4906(03)00020-6

Smith, J., Meyers, C., & Burkhalter, A. (1992). Communicate: Strategies for International Teaching Assistants. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Stephen Daniel Looney is the ITA Program Director and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Penn State. He is the current Chair of the ITA-IS, and his research focuses on L1 and L2 use in the university STEM classroom.